Chapter 34

The first thing Kaleb had done, after teleporting her personal things to Alja, had been speaking to his higher ranking staff. If he wanted them to believe tonight's incident was a planned action, he couldn't let them wait too long for an explanation. Many of them were still working, as they always did, when they knew he had a public appearance and was likely to come by at the HQ afterwards.

"I have taken the opportunity to take the whole situation to a public level. It will force the other Councilors to show their hands." He had told them. "Our preparation for any form of violent escalation is at a peak now. It would only strain our resources to engage in their shadow play any longer."

Most of them hadn't seemed to have any objections to his actions. They expected the unexpected. He was glad he had always taken care to act politically unpredictable. Otherwise the situation would have been a complete disaster. Now he might even profit from the insecurity he must have caused everyone, including the other former Councilors. Nikita had been the only one bold enough to contact him so far. In their short telepathic conversation he had told her basically the same he had told his staff minus the part about the war preparations.

"Was that your official statement on the Silence situation?" she had asked.

"I suppose it will be interpreted as such. But we both know this war is not about Silence. It is about power as it always has been. Only when the power structure is steady again, will the Net have a chance to stabilize. Then we will see about Silence." A comment that wouldn't endanger his alliance with Nikita yet. She had however made a long thoughtful pause as if she thought differently. And it might be she had insights similar to the ones Alja had offered him. After all she hadn't cut all connections to her defected, empathic daughter – contrary to what she had the public believe. That might be helpful in the future but for now it was enough, if they all racked their brains about what he was up to. They all thought him capable of sparking a revolution to gain power in the ensuing chaos, which was very close to his original goals. But keeping those hidden was no longer the most important thing. What mattered more was to keep Alja out of the spotlight as far as possible.

Judd's message got to him while he was going over some of the media reports Silver had already assembled for him. The reports and occasional images floated across the screen of his built-in desk monitor. Barely anything caught his notice. The public knew nothing of importance.

Talking to his fellow rebel would be harder. Judd wouldn't be satisfied with so easy an explanation, knowing him much better than most others and having some claim on knowing where he was leading the rebellion.

He took his time answering, diving into the slipstreams of the Net first to evaluate the reaction of the Psy population. Confusion, whispers of rebellion, insecurity. Nothing that could be dangerous for him yet, but it might be the last straw, the spark leading to a chain reaction that might forever decide the fate of the Psy. And he hadn't even truly lost control – yet. Everything he'd ever learned about himself and the nature of his powers told him to stop, to draw back behind the safe chill of Silence.

And he tried. He had honed his conditioning well enough that he might be able to keep it functioning at an acceptable level for weeks even if it was crumbling all over the place. The problem was that he lost all will to do so the moment he slipped back to the physical plane and his eyes were drawn to one of the pictures that had the media going nuts right now. It was a good shot of him and Alja dancing, her body practically cast on his. Her skin was pure light kissed with gold against the dark blue swirl of her dress that caressed her figure in the motion of the dance. And his hand was pressing a little too hard on that skin.

Possessive. That was how it looked.

Good. Shall the fucking changelings know that one is mine.

He was surprised at his own thoughts. He should be thinking about how to turn the situation to his favor, berate himself that he let things tumble out of control like this. But all that was on his mind was a deep satisfaction at having made a public claim on Alja. He began to understand why the kind of feelings he developed for Alja were so often related to insanity even by those used to emotion.

He wondered if she already knew what an impact their little show had made. He also started itching to get back to her although he knew she was safe. No one would find her in the Net. And only he knew the cabin in the mountains even existed. He had transported installed the whole compound there with Tk.

To his relief Judd agreed to an immediate meeting the moment he answered his message. Still the Ex-Arrow took some time to get to the old warehouse, since he refused to teleport, saving his energies for possible emergencies.

"You're expecting an explanation." He let the Ghost greet him from the shadows. Stealthy like the assassin he still was, Kaleb had only noticed Judd when he entered the empty hall. Would Alja be able to sneak up to him like that too?

"Yes." Judd knew the Ghost didn't consider himself accountable to anyone. He was a lone warrior who kept only fleeting alliances that were useful to reach goals only known to himself. But they had worked together for a long time and… "I need to know if we're still on the same side."

"Probably more so than ever." A voice flat and toneless, wrapped in Silence.

But then the notorious rebel shifted in the shadows. Unusual. He had always preferred to be rather motionless. "Then why didn't you tell me what you were planning in advance?"

"Because I didn't plan it. I just took an opportunity." A slightly different lie for every party. He had been playing deception for long enough to know this house of cards wouldn't hold for long. Sooner rather than later something would have to give.

"To do what? Accelerate the war?" The former assassin didn't bother to hide the suspicion in his tone.

And Kaleb knew he'd been right. Judd wasn't as easily to please as the others. "The Net's destabilizing. We're running out of time. The process of –" A short hesitation, while Kaleb tried to avoid the word 'war' for reasons he didn't fully understand himself. "change needed to be sped up."

"You're ready to take the rebellion into the open?"

"Not yet. But I intend to be credible once I do."

Another motion in the darkness. Hadn't he known better, Judd would have thought the Ghost was nervous. "Credible?… this was never about Silence. Not for you."

"It is for the populace." Another pause. "And even my priorities might change with time."

When he answered Judd kept his voice as even as the man he was talking to, but a new, alarming possibility was unfolding before him and it was not a comforting thought. "Does that mean you're considering a breach of the Protocol?"

Kaleb knew he was taking a big risk by even hinting at a possible degeneration of his conditioning, but Judd was the only one who could maybe offer a solution. "Allowing a certain level of emotion might be inevitable."

Another enigmatic answer. But it told Judd that something had fundamentally changed about the Ghost. Was this the beginning of his descent into insanity? "You cannot control this once it's started."

"You could."

Judd went silent for several minutes. When he spoke he no longer hid the concern in his voice. The Ghost might not understand it, but he had just asked for a friend's advice. "I don't want to deny you what it's given to me. But you said yourself, breaking Silence may never be an option for you. You should be very careful." That was nothing new. And Judd knew the Ghost was waiting for something else. The answer would be a great gift of trust. One Judd wasn't sure he was ready to give. "You can try to allow emotions up to a certain level. It may work as long as you leave the second layer of dissonance intact."

"Second layer?" Kaleb had never read the term in any of the file or article the Council had on the conditioning process.

"That's what I call the fail-safes that short circuit your powers or turn them against you when you feel too strongly. The moment the second layer starts troubling you, you need to retreat from any form of emotional stimuli and rebuilt your shields as we have been taught during conditioning." Judd remembered the pictures from the tabloids. That level of intimate contact it must have cost him. He remembered what Selenka had said: I'll eat my own tail if there's not something going on between them. Impossible. "Or is it already affecting you?"

When Judd explained, Kaleb remembered the constructs that had indeed once been built into his conditioning. The part of the Protocol that was added for those with offensive abilities. "No, it doesn't affect me," he answered truthfully. It couldn't. He had removed all components of what Judd called the second layer when he was seventeen. He had never thought about them again, never needed them until now. At the time the pain controls and the memory of a life being snuffed out by his power had been enough. He had never wanted to feel again. But now… He realized he might have made a fatal mistake. "What if I remove that second layer?" he asked, although he already knew the answer.

"You'd have to be insane to do that. Without it you'd be a loaded gun with no safety catch." With the term gun not even beginning to cover it. Weapon of mass destruction would be more apt, Judd thought.

What followed was absolute silence from the man opposite to him. After a long pause the Ghost spoke again.

"Thank you. This kind of information is hard to come by inside the Net." Because no one was supposed to know how to disable any part of the conditioning. And for good reason as Kaleb learned with every new fissure in his.

Judd noticed that the Ghost's voice held not a hint of disappointment or frustration at having his hopes at a live beyond Silence crushed to dust by probably the only man he came even close to trusting. Of course not. He was still Silent after all.

Silent but considering.

Judd knew he could – probably should leave it at that. He had to make a decision. He could try to contain the Ghosts state of Silence and sanity as long as possible, or take a leap of faith and give hope to a friend, who was the image of what he could have easily become himself.

It wasn't easy. Even after all the change he'd been through, he was still new to friendship and trust. And he couldn't ask those he usually relied on. But he could work with logic: What would Brenna do? And suddenly the answer was easy: Brenna would always help a friend, even if it was a risk. It was strange, Judd thought, that the Ghost would probably never know that he was about to be indebted to a woman who had suffered the most savage cruelties by his very own mentor.

There was only one thing he needed to know: "Are you still considering that one person I asked you about?" One person you do not want to die.

Kaleb felt the sharp bite of some new, yet strangely familiar feeling, as the other man reminded him of the quest he had pushed aside over his obsession with Alja. But he hadn't forgotten. "Yes."

"That woman you were dancing with…"

"No. She has nothing to do with this except providing the opportunity I was talking about."

Judd couldn't dare to ask any further. It hadn't occurred to him before, but in the twisted state of affairs, he had to talk to Aden or Vasic first, make sure Kaleb even knew he had spun one of the Net's deadliest assassins across the dance floor.

The 'yes' had to be enough. One person even the Ghost cared about. One shred of humanity. "If you ever want to go further, you will need something that checks your powers instead of the second layer." Then he explained the mental tripwire he had built in his own mind to keep his abilities from derailing lethally. "But a tripwire works only, in case of a short emotional outburst. It gives you the second your reason might need to catch up with the emotional response."

The implication was clear: It would not work, when he wasn't capable of reason in the first place. It would be useless, if he went insane. "That was more than I could have – expected. I'll inform you immediately if something of interest happens."

Cold, calculated words. But they held the promise he'd repay Judd's favor with information and probably with loyalty.